History

On March 4, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the act that formed the organization of the Territory of Idaho. Idaho County is the largest County in Idaho.  It covers 8,503 square miles, and has 6,925 square miles of National Forest land within the county. The first settlement in the new county was by gold seekers from Pierce, Idaho, who in 1861 followed the Nez Perce Trail into Elk City Basin, hopeful of finding gravel deposits that would contain gold. The hopes of miners were realized and Elk City became the pioneer settlement of upper Clearwater county. No town existed until the following year when a local government was established. The gold seekers trek had begun. News of discoveries in Florence reached the ears of prospectors everywhere. Thousands of men left good gravel deposits for the better promise of gold in the Idaho mountain area of Florence. By the fall of 1862 a town of tents, lean-tos and brush houses had developed into a boom town. Florence became the first county seat town. By 1875 Mount Idaho was developing into a prosperous town. Built largely as a stop for traffic to the gold fields, it seemed destined to be a more permanent settlement than the boom towns. As a result mining was spreading to other areas: Orogrande, Dixie, Newsome, Salmon River, Golden, Marshall Lake, Burgdorf and others. The Marshall Lake district lies about 40 miles north of McCall, on Payette Lake, the nearest railroad point, and is reached from there by wagon road. The ore deposits are small quartz-bearing fissure veins carrying gold which is largely free milling. This appears to be one of the most promising gold camps of central Idaho. Marshall Lake mining did not get into serious production until 1914 from outgrowth of the nearby Thunder Mountain referred to by early prospectors to be "a mountain of gold". Production lasted until 1922 and from 1935 to 1942 when the national gold mining shutdown suspended operations there. It is estimated a total of $2,000,000 in gold was produced from the Marshall Lake Mining District. 

With the discovery of gold by James Marshall at Sutter’s Mill on California’s American River, January 24, 1848, thousands of miners stampeded across the country looking for their fortunes in gold. News of the gold strike reached around the world to the southern port cities of China and many Chinese also packed up and steamed towards their own Gum Shan or “Mountain of Gold.”Over 300,000 “forty-niner” gold miners would eventually make their way to California. As soon as those initial claims played out, the miners went searching for the next great gold strike, finding strikes in the future states of Nevada in 1859, Idaho in 1860, and Montana in 1863. Within twenty years after that initial discovery in California, miners had spread throughout the West, digging for gold in just about every territory and state west of the Mississippi. Gold was discovered in what would become the town of Warren in the summer of 1862. With this discovery occurring only fourteen short years after the California gold rush, the history of Warren is much more than just a history of a mining town. Warren’s history is intertwined with the history of the formation of the Idaho Territory and the political beginnings of the State of Idaho.